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Comment the most moronic subject matter on slashdot (Score 2) 365

can we stop with this nonsense please? it is similar to idiots who oppose teaching all kids programming

restricting access to developing a skillset which just builds on abstract reasoning is a joke, nothing more. it's as if lots of people making lots of programs somehow hurts good programs and good programmers. how? can someone define me how that works? there has to be a formal logical fallacy for what this low iq idea suggests. it's like saying gays getting married somehow hurts heterosexual marriage. and we see how well that mental diarrhea has persuaded

lots of people trying programming only hurts mediocre programmers. the only kind of people who take this nonissue seriously. it's popularity on slashdot therefore does not bode very well for the readership of this website

meanwhile, i welcome anyone who wants to try programming and i wish them well. it can be fun, it can be infuriating. and if in your quest you wind up being more skilled and hired to replaced than the kind of weak mouth breather who wants to somehow magically limit the pursuit of programming to some of kind of bullshit guild, this a surefire win

Comment Re:Physics time! You misunderstand ion drives (Score 1) 518

If it's not reactionless then you're transferring momentum and energy and momentum are conserved in the same way they are in a regular rocket. If it's actually reactionless then presumably you would find you were harvesting energy from the spatial differences in the laws of physics. Either way, you wouldn't have a perpetual motion machine.

Comment Re: Looking more and more likely all the time... (Score 2) 518

Noether's theorem doesn't "fall." In this context it says (roughly) that if the laws of physics are the same in all places then linear momentum is conserved. We believe that the laws of physics don't vary with position, but they could.

Also, there are various explanations for how the drive could work without violating conservation of momentum. They require some other interesting violations of things we currently believe to be true, but aren't necessarily.

Comment Re:Blimey (Score 2) 518

For outer system stuff you'd use a nuke.

"Fuel" in terms of energy isn't the problem in a rocket. The problem is the requirement to haul around reaction mass: stuff to throw out the back. If you don't need to do that, the tyranny of the rocket equation goes away and space travel suddenly becomes a much different proposition.

Comment The argument is "leaky" at best too (Score 4, Informative) 195

Pathogens don't "learn". They evolve, ok. They adapt, ok. But they aren't sentient. They are not thinking. And especially they aren't thinking "hey, if they vaccinate, they won't die anyway, at least not as fast, so let's get more deadly!" This isn't the fucking Pandemic flash game for crying out loud!

There is no interest of killing a host for a parasite. It's an side effect. Unintended, and actually harmful for the parasite in the long run. Just like poisoning the seas is harmful for us. We ain't some comic book villain who does it for ... well, for being evil. We do it 'cause it cuts costs. The oil spill is only the side effect, not the reason we do it.

So yes, they COULD get more deadly because we don't die as fast and a more deadly mutated strain would kill itself off with the host if there was no vaccination. But that is hardly an argument against vaccination. It only means that at worst we're with vaccination where we are now without. AT WORST. If, and only if, the pathogens mutate in such a way that they get more deadly. Which is neither in their interest nor anything they would (evolutionary) strive for.

What's the benefit for a pathogen to be more deadly? Killing the host is actually bad for it, since that ends spreading (with this host at least).

Comment Re:Something IS Wrong (Score 1) 365

I can dissolve that conspiracy theory: They are more afraid of someone finding a way to bypass their input sanitizers than losing money from hacks. So no characters are allowed that could possibly, remotely, be considered "active" or "command" characters in any language they could probably think of.

Also, most, if not all, of the hacks happen due to people getting their passwords stolen by trojans and the like rather than someone actually guessing the passwords.

Comment Re:Salted your passwords (Score 2) 365

Provided that we now know how your passwords are created, finding your password is essentially not harder or easier than before. From a technical point of view of course. Actually, it probably is much easier now considering that, since you probably rely on your creation algorithm to introduce enough entropy, you probably choose simpler passwords.

Comment That's your problem? (Score 1) 365

Given that most of these webpages are also the ones where you have to answer some "secret" question to recover your password, it's kinda moot to select a secure password.

What is it you say? "Instead of giving a real answer to the "secret" question, simply use another randomly generated string?"

That's a good idea. Until the admin of the page locks your account because "you obviously are a robot, because humans don't do this".

The problem runs far, far deeper, people...

Comment Re:User scripts FTW (Score 1) 6

My point was just those features make quickie editing even quicker - your Amazon script is

var el = document.querySelector('#summaryStars, .totalReviewCount'), total = parseInt(el && el.textContent)

if (total) {
    Array.from(document.querySelectorAll('#histogramTable td:last-child a')), a => {
            var num = parseInt(a.textContent), pct = 100 * (num / total)
            a.innerHTML = `${num} - <b>${pct.toFixed(0)}%</b>`
        })
}

and about two dozen of my scripts are variations on this :) Put the basic framework in the new script template and you just need to fill in a selector and what to do with each element...

There are a lot of annoying websites out there lol, hope this comes in handy next time one just needs that little fix... ;)

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